things my parents did right #2

[metaphortunate]

They always let me go.

My house, growing up, it was not a house of happiness. That's probably overstating the case? I guess? I know so many people now who grew up in abuse, and we were not abused, seriously we were cherished and taken care of in every way, so I don't want to complain too much. But the truth is: it was not a happy house. No one was happy living in it. And I was always looking for a way out. Oh, we had friends over sometimes, but mostly I was angling for an invitation. I was trying to get a ride, I was trying for a sleepover, I was trying to leave the state.

And my parents let me go.

They let me spend all day swimming at D's house, all summer, every summer. They let me go on a weird overnight campout thing that turned out to be at a Christian camp. They let me go on a hundred million sleepovers. They let me go to France for a month. They let me go to Six Flags Houston with my best friend when I was just little. They let me go to Washington D.C. on a school trip, they let me go to Georgia for six weeks with my cousin to stay with her cousins on the other side of the family that I'd never even met. They let me go to upstate New York. They let me go to Chicago for college. They let me go over to my friends' houses after school, on the weekends, every weekend, in high school, spending the night, theoretically I wasn't allowed to go out to Rocky Horror or whatever we did at 2 am but they must have known that when I wasn't home they really didn't have any idea where the hell I was.

They must have been so goddamn brave.

What are you afraid of, I would ask, exasperated. Because they didn't want to let me do any of these things. Where they come from, girls don't wander around the world by themselves. It's totally normal to live with your parents until you get married. They never wanted to let me do any of these things. WHAT?! What are you afraid of?! NOTHING, I would patiently explain at the age of eight or eighteen, nothing is going to happen to me! I'll be fine! And they were too scared to even tell me explicitly what they were afraid would happen to me.

I know now, of course. Rape. Murder. Child abuse. Molestation. Carjacking. Mugging. Brushfire. Drowning. Flash flood. Peer pressure. Alcohol poisoning. Meningitis. Tetanus. Drunk driving, car crash, drugs, teenage pregnancy, religious indoctrination, kidnapping, AIDS. Kidney theft. Bullying. Arrest. Falling in with the wrong crowd.

None of that ever happened to me, barring the bare minimum of inevitable sexual groping and harassment that you (female) cannot avoid collecting as you go through life no matter what you do. And, I guess, depending on your point of view, a certain amount of falling in with the wrong crowd. Some of them were actually the very right crowd. Some of them weren't and I learned some valuable lessons that way. What actually did happen to me were awesome things. I have so many good memories of the places I went, too many good stories to tell in one post. I love all of the places I went, even if I was always going away, not really knowing or caring where I was going to.

And if anything bad had happened to me, I know my parents would have taken the blame. They would have been blamed and they would have blamed themselves. So let me give them the credit for everything that went right. That's only fair. They always let me go. I'm very grateful.

Comments

[wild_irises]

That's a huge thing, and it's a huge thing to notice.

It's how I felt about my brother and sister-in-law letting Emma stay in Sweden when they came home from sabbatical. She had made a real group of friends for the first time in her life (probably because her father was sick when she was in middle school), and Cathy (Emma's mom) has some real deep quarrels with the United States. Nonetheless, letting your 15-year-old live with a family you hardly know in a country 8,000 miles away is a giant act of trust. What your folks did was perhaps smaller, but beautifully ongoing.

I wish I thought you could say this to your mother, but I have a sad feeling she would hear it wrong.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, no I couldn't say this to her. I can try and keep gratitude in mind, though.

Yes, your brother and Cathy must have been very brave.

[thistleingrey]

This is terribly useful as anecdatum because one of my parents in particular almost never let me go anywhere, and as a result my calibration for what's fine, what's sorta fine, and what's probably a terrible idea is several notches over to one side merely because I Don't Know. (ETA I mean in terms of "permissiveness" and my own child.) I had to pre-choose what I asked permission to go to because had I asked for everything I'd have had nothing; asking for a tiny sliver yielded a tinier sliver still, but, like, non-zero. And then I had to justify why I was asking, say who would be there, sometimes say whom I'd sit next to...which sharpened my analytical, predictive, how-to-pitch, and now-is-the-time-to-prevaricate skills a treat, but not my sense of how children and teens deal with situations as they happen. (College, where I did make my own rules about risk, isn't the same.) So yes. Thank you for posting this, even if--especially because--it is about one individual.

[phi]

Ditto here. One time I got a ride home during lunch to pick up an assignment I had forgotten. My dad happened to be home, and he was furious that I rode in a car with a boy. I was grounded for twelve months: no leaving the house for any reason except school and debate tournaments. No library, no visits to friends houses, hell, I wasn't even allowed to go clothes shopping with my mother. She picked all my clothes for me for a whole goddamn year.

By the time I got to college I was so stir-crazy that I was taking completely, utterly stupid risks, even by the standards of "dumb things eighteen year olds who are too smart for their own good sometimes do."

[metaphortunate]

My parents' total inability to set and enforce rules did have downsides. Nonetheless, I was so lucky that was the side they chose to err on.

You forgive a lot.

[metaphortunate]

Who you'd sit next to? Damn.

[thistleingrey]

Power, not real protectiveness at that point.

[snippy]

I'm so glad you have this to remember and appreciate. And that it was appropriate for you, and that it worked out well for you.

One of my partners is very proud of an experience zie had at around age 12 to 14 (sorry, don't remember exactly) when zir parents left zie and a sibling alone at home while they went on a 2 or 3 week vacation. Nothing bad happened, yay! Zie was very mad at me when I expressed that I thought it was a bad idea even though it worked out well. I'm just very focused on how things can go wrong, because in my childhood they mostly went about as wrong as they could.

My sister (who is 2 years younger than I am) did a lot of that staying with friends etc., but she had a lot of the bad experiences that are predicted: rape, forced drug use, teenage pregnancy, bullying...and my mother kicked her out of the house when she was only 14 for suffering the consequences. And I had a lot of very bad experiences of being left alone and in charge of younger siblings (which I recognize is completely different from your experiences).

Because I am a parent and because of my sister's and my experiences, I have mixed feelings about *parents* who make these choices. It is so very hard to find a feeling of safety about letting your children have experiences that might have bad consequences, even though I think that is an important way to learn about growing up. I always tried to let my children make choices in areas where the worst possible consequence wasn't going to be a lifelong limitation or damage or any other sort of non-recoverable consequence.

But one of the important things I've learned as a parent is that it's almost never about what I chose, that my children will/did/are allowed to make their own choices even when I wish they wouldn't. And that my best efforts to give them experiences with only limitedly bad possible consequences were mostly for naught, because they made choices that sometimes led to even worse consequences. And that was their right, no matter how much I wanted something different for them.

[metaphortunate]

Yeah, plus...there's no safe choices. I got bullied by my parents' friends' kids while my parents were happily chatting downstairs and I was upstairs with a hand over my mouth so I couldn't scream for help. How many people do we know who have been abused by family members their moms were sure were safe?

I mean, we have to do our best, but...I try to keep in mind that the contexts I pick as safe may not actually be any safer than the contexts my kid will pick as safe. especially as he gets older and knows way more about his life than I do. Especially if I can manage to raise him in an environment of safety, so that his instincts know what safe feels like.

[snippy]

I really like your idea of an environment of safety and I think I tried to do that, too, without labeling it.

The other thing I focused on was the safety of telling me ANYTHING that made them uncomfortable, and getting to have at least some choice of just venting or having me suggest things to do, or do something about it myself.

In the teen years my big focus was "this is the time to learn how you feel and how to handle yourself when you feel that way, how you take care of your feelings and how and when you choose to express them." Because that really is, in the teen years, a great time to work on that. You're not going to get fired from a job for a temper tantrum, or for weeping from grief, or for dancing from joy--you might miss a day of school but so what? You can practice appropriate ways of expressing yourself *and* you can practice taking care of yourself, figuring out when you need mood music or a nap or a bath or a walk outside or some friendly company or to write poetry or whathaveyou.

[metaphortunate]

So true!

I could not tell my parents anything about anything that made me uncomfortable because they didn't WANT to let me go anywhere, so I couldn't say anything that suggested that maybe anything was less than perfectly 100% safe, lest they change their minds. So I didn't have that going for me.

But what I did have was that it was perfectly clear to the most casual eye that I was a kid with people keeping an eye on me. I mean, the very fact that I had to lie like a rug about everything in order to be allowed to go. Obviously, it wasn't that my parents didn't care where I went. I was a kid that someone would notice in a big hurry if I went missing.

[spuffyduds]

It really is hard and I have had to work on it, because my parents mostly liked to have me in SIGHT. (Only girl after four boys, late-life child for them both, serious health problems from about age 4 to 11--I *get* their overprotectiveness, I really do.) But like another commenter said above, that made it hard to figure out what was actually REASONABLE. My husband, thankfully, had had a much more "ride bikes all over the neighborhood, show up for dinner" type of childhood, so he moderated my instincts a great deal.

And having them in another COUNTRY is, yeah, seriously tough--T1's trip to Barbados last year, I was SO happy for him and SO worried/nervous etc., and he was TWENTY.

[metaphortunate]

Aww. Did it all turn out well?

[spuffyduds]

It did! As for me, nasty immune issues resolved themselves at puberty (YAY PUBERTY< I SAY WITHOUT IRONY) and as for T1, I think Barbados is one of the best things that has happened to him in his LIFE thus far--he really expanded his friends group a lot, and now thinks of himself as a person who can make friends quickly, as well as just having lots of wonderful experiences (and rum.)

[kate_nepveu]

I think about my walking the mile to elementary school with friends and no adults and being amazed at my instinctive "no way!" reaction. (There is a much, much busier street between here and SteelyKid's soon-to-be elementary school than there was for me, but that's not the issue.) Let alone the going to hang out with people I met on the Internet. It's amazing how the difficulty level changes from one side to the other.

So: yeah.

[metaphortunate]

Yep. Hopefully we'll manage to keep some sense of perspective. :) I dunno though. When I was sixteen, sixteen-year-olds driving around made perfect sense to me! Now it gives me the cold sweats.

[norah]

TOO HARD UGH.

My parents let me go too - though I think I maybe wasn't kicking quite as hard to get away - but now that I am a parent I think TOO HARD TOO HARD TOO HARD MY BABY WHAT IF, you know?

I love all the thoughtful comments here. I know I can't MAKE them safe, you know? Horrible things happened to me in some of the safest places, as well as some of the riskier ones, and the times I was truly on my own were hands-down the most rewarding. I was safe despite terrible choices and then others that seemed innocuous bit me in the ass. That's life, but in retrospect it makes me want to bubble-wrap the kids.

[metaphortunate]

I KNOW. That's why I'm looking back & retroactively being filled with gratitude! Cliche as hell, but it really was a lot harder for them than I realized at the time. I'm already gritting my teeth in anticipation of my turn to let go.

(IN BABY STEPS. TINY BABY STEPS.)